DECONSTRUCTING THE DONOR

date; 4/27/09

The UHAUL truck I ended up getting, was the good box/bad engine truck, UHAUL was nice enough to tow the thing 2 hours south & park it right in front of my home for me. Of course, as usual with most of my old shit/new shit projects, once the old shows up in front of my home, I start having second thoughts as to what the hell I’m doing! But I always seem to pull it off. Yeahh she wasn’t the best looking thing at first, but maybe that’s what draws me to start with something old in the first place- the transformation. Over the first week in the evenings, I got the box prepped for deconstruction by doing all the things I could with one person, removing the inner rubber rails, inner corner pieces, photographing all the connections, because I was going to be the one putting it all back together someday, studying all the parts & developing a plan of attack for a two day box party. The plan was to spend a Thursday/Friday completely removing all necessary parts then to get rid of the truck, so as not to get the neighbors too suspicious, for this, I recruited ‘the polish sausage’ a friend of mine I’ve employed before for various remodeling projects. We hit it hard Thursday morning & by that evening we had the door, the roof, the side walls & cabover removed. We also investigated the floor deck enough to know Friday wasn’t going to be fun.

Friday morning came, we got the remaining front wall off, and then hit a bump on the floor, about 40 of the 140 bolts holding the floor to the frame were completely frozen on. After a couple hours of no progress, I pulled out the cutting torch & found I could surgically blow the bolts out without vaporizing the aluminum floor deck around them.

By 5:00 we had the floor completely off, & I spent some time on Sunday removing the back bumper & rear light panel above it, as this had a strong connection to the back corner pieces.

Saturday, Bethany & I went up to Portland to see the factory modifications done on the bullet, painting, navigation, alarm system, power doors/windows/mirrors. All look fantastic, but still waiting for the wheels from rickson trucks, I did see the tires though, they look huge sitting in the warehouse, and I’ll still be amazed if they fit without a lift. I’ll keep you posted on those.